Made of Everything You're Not

Straight up, I'm a LLMP developer with a twist; I love me some Linux, Lighttpd, MySQL and PHP. I'll save that discussion for another time but suffice it to say I've been working this way for about a year now and I haven't had any performance issues. It wasn't always this way though.

Now, I say all that so I can say I've been developing on my Vista machine with IIS lately. Weird, right? It took a lot of work and research but I've got it performing pretty stable for my needs. I'm not ready to start developing any client sites on it or anything but for the small "Please parse this csv file for me" type of requests it's perfect.

One of the more difficult concepts to grasp was how to add additional sites or projects to IIS. Here's how to do it:

NOTE: This was done with IIS 7 on a Vista Business Service Pack 1 laptop.

1. Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager

   

2. Right click over “Sites” in the left pane and select Add Web Site.

   

3. Enter the Site name, browse to the Physical Path (doc root) and enter the Host Name (URI).
   Optional: edit your hosts file under Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and add the IP \t URI
4. Click OK

When I first had the idea of starting a blog I of course went looking at some of the open source blog systems out there. I had previously worked with a few of them for client projects so I was already familiar with pMachine, WordPress and Serendipity but I also checked out some of the smaller ones. HotScripts was a decent source for finding a solution as was SourceForge. I actually spent quite a bit of time on this; installing a program, running it through its paces, evaluating, repeat.

While going through that process I started mapping out what my blog was going to be. Of course there was going to be the blog side of the site but I also decided I wanted a place to, well, brag about my work (I’m really proud of what we do at StreetWise) as well as an area to release some of the code I write.

A little background, I’d always wanted to be a part of an open source project; I’m a big fan of the open source ideology and always on the lookout for new code. It’s really one of the better benefits of working in php; there’s a lot of it. Just checkout hotscripts or sourceforge and you’ll see what I mean. In addition to that; there’s phpclasses.org; now that’s a site worth checking out for some cool code (if, well, old code). Not to mention the plethora of other developers out there releasing code and providing guidance.

Anyway, while I was checking out the blog systems another requirement came into play; joining a project. This immediately put pMachine out of the running since it’s not open source so I started checking out the communities of WordPress and Serendipity.

Both WordPress and Serendipity are pretty stable and have thriving communities. Almost too thriving and stable; there doesn’t seem to be very much I could contribute that would make any kind of lasting difference. I have a great deal of respect for both but if all that’s left to do is write plugins and themes; well I’m just bored with the idea really.

So what the hell, "Why not write my own?", I thought.

I’ve already written a few for some clients before and at the base it’s really just CRUD work with a bunch of bells and whistles anyway. Plus, if I write my own I get to sharpen my skills, have a blog topic and have more code to release.

BTW, since I'm writing this before I've actually written the system, I'm currently using WordPress as a blog system. To be honest, I do like it. If I wasn't a programmer I would probably use it full time too; but since I don't teach; I do

Who are you?

My name is Eric Lamb and I’m a programmer living in Los Angeles. I’ve been writing code since I was a kid beginning on a TI91. Currently, I’m the Director of IT for a marketing agency called StreetWise Concepts & Culture. Because I oversee all aspects of IT for the company I’m exposed to two very different disciplines; managing both hardware and software.

We work primarily in php and JavaScript, building web sites and writing scripts for our clients, but I’m always dabbling in other languages like perl, VB.NET, python and Power Shell to manage our network (we use both Windows 2003 and CentOS) and fun.

What this is...

I have 2 basic goals for this blog; write about interesting research and programming ideas and publish open source code and random scripts. Oh yeah, and rants. There'll definitely be the occasional rant. (Rants are fun too

Because my day job exposes me to so many interesting and cool aspects of IT and programming it feels right to share the results with the community. It feels like every day I run into a problem / solution that was interesting and complicated enough to warrant sharing.

The other side is code. I write a lot of code and some of that code’s pretty cool, most of it sucks, but there’s usually something interesting or useful about it. Of course there’s the day to day stuff, where a new or interesting old issue comes into play, but I’m also interested in publishing a few of my projects. So you can definitely expect to see lots of code here!

Will this be any good?

Honestly, probably not. Seriously though, if you’re into programming and IT I think you’ll find some useful info here. If you’re a family member or friend looking for information about me and what I’m doing though, this is going to suck.